Pokemon I Choose You: Final Japanese Trailer

Who’s ready for a nostalgia bomb? Pokemon: I Choose You, the feature film marking the 20th anniversary of the Pokemon anime, opens in Japanese theaters in one week. Is an English release not far off?

The final trailer pretty much confirms what the previous trailers implied: this is a big-screen remake of the events in the show’s first episode. We see Ash in his pajamas meeting Pikachu for the first time. We get the scene of him dragging Pikachu up a hill with a leash. We see Pikachu shocking the horde of attacking Spearows to save Ash’s life. We get the Ho-Oh appearance and this time Ash receives a souvenir from the encounter (no, he doesn’t get pooped on). And does Pikachu lick Ash’s face? Yep, Pikachu licks Ash’s face.

The first episode of Pokemon, though, was about 20 minutes long. Are we in for a lot of padding or will they be adapting events from other early episodes? We still haven’t seen Misty and there’s no trace of her bike in the Spearows scene…at this point, we’re just going to assume Ash and Pikachu are the only two characters onscreen for the majority of the film.

The emotional song used in this trailer isn’t actually from this movie. It’s lifted from The Rise Of Darkrai, a Pokemon film from 2007, and probably won’t be appearing in the new one. It fits the footage, though.

As for the English dub, there is still no word on that, but given that every single other Pokemon feature has arrived here in one form or another, it’s an inevitability. Pokemon: I Choose You opens in Japan July 15.